Halos form when ice crystals in the air refract the light from a bright source, bending it back toward you. They’re common around the Sun, and a bit less common around the Moon because the Moon is fainter (though the sky is darker at night, giving you better contrast). But the little rainbow flare you can see off to the side is much rarer in Moon bows. Called parhelia (or sundogs), they have a similar origin as the bow, but are due to flat, hexagonal-shaped ice crystals. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Moon dog!

And that little blue gizmo off to the side is a new one on me as well! Cool.

Also cool, in that picture, is that you can see the tube of the old 6″ telescope at UVa, built over 100 years ago and still a fine piece of work. Back in 1994 I used that ‘scope to observe the scars left on the top of Jupiter’s atmosphere by the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9, a comet that broke into pieces and repeatedly slammed Jupiter. I could see them as small but perfectly formed black spots on the planet. It was awe-inspiring, to see impact remnants larger than Earth, knowing that impacts like that on our own planet would have wiped us out as a species.

… hmmm… it’s cool, where your mind wanders, and where a single picture can take you.

Back in 1997, I was staying with a friend on top of Grizzly Peak, just above UC Berkely. There was a lot of low hanging moisture/fog that night and I saw a triple moon halo. The moon appeared to be at the bottom of an opalescent tunnel, with the first and brightest nearest the moon, the secondary just outside the primary and appearing closer to me. The third halo was so dim, I could really only see the brightest colors. The darker colors faded to invisibility. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen around the moon.
I have yet to see a triple halo around the sun.

Not about moon halos or moon dogs. Just curious if the shed which contains the 6 inch (Alvin Clark and Sons) is still called the doghouse? Also did they ever replace the 8 inch (Tinsley?) reflector which really wasn’t very good?

A while back I was listening to WGBH Boston, to a music critic talking about Schubert’s Winterreise, the song “Nebensonnen”, when he referred to the line, “I saw three suns” as “phantasmagoric”. I wanted to get on the horn and chew the fool out: it’s exactly in late autumn, at least in the North East, when you’re most likely to see sundogs, and if the sun itself is obscured just so by clouds, the it and its dogs can easily look equally bright.

Oooh, I saw one of those rings around the moon on my first night in Flagstaff! (I had been in the US for *counts* six days, and all of those so far had been in LA.) Didn’t show on the photo, unfortunately. This was the 18th of February, around 8 or 9 PM.

When I was a kid back in Yakima, Washington, where icy cirrostratus clouds are common in winter, I remember one night when the halo around the moon was especially bright, almost as bright as the full moon itself. I don’t recall if there were any moondogs.

Anyway, the next morning, a local talk radio show we always listened to was inundated with phone calls from people convinced the end was nigh because of the “sign from god” the previous night. Being the snotty kid that I am, er, was, I called up and explained the true nature of the phenomenon. While the host of the show himself was grateful, the rest of the hour was filled with angry callers denouncing the uppity kid who thought he was so smart.

There was a total eclipse of the sun a few years later…I don’t think I listened to the talk shows then.

@kuhnigget:“Anyway, the next morning, a local talk radio show we always listened to was inundated with phone calls from people convinced the end was nigh because of the “sign from god” the previous night.”

Ouch. There goes the neighborhood… It’s a good thing that common sense and education has improved since, and all you sensible folks on the other side of the big pond don’t let those doomsday fans near guns, or, heaven forbid, weapons of the nuclear kind, right?

Well, I’ll be. So *that’s* what a moon dog/sun dog is. I’ve seen sun dogs before, and figured it was ice crystals in the upper atmosphere forming a nice rainbow effect, but didn’t know what it was called.

As others have pointed out, the bright blue spot is possibly lens flare, coincidentally on top of the halo. However, below and to the left is a bright rainbow-like spot, and that is the moon dog, I believe.

IVAN3MAN mentioned “click on [his] name” and see a better moon dog image. For those who didn’t, and/or aren’t familiar with the Atmospheric Optics website, check out all the photos, along with <warning>scientific explanations</warning> of what causes them. (Along with all of the “so that’s what they’re called” information as well. Anyone seen some anti-crepuscular rays lately?)

George, yup we love calling it the Doghouse. 8-inch Tinsley, is that up at Fan Mountain, now? The Doghouse now houses the 6-inch and a 10-inch Celestron with Autostar. The latter is nice but can be pain to setup, so I still prefer the 6-inch.

Speaking of old scopes, we at CAS (along with a huge load of work by Jim Barr of the Astronomy Department) are slowly working on the Cooke Astrograph up at Fan Mtn. It was a really cutting edge instrument in its day, but it’s seen better days.

The mount is a big honking equatorial and is getting a new drive motor, but the Cooke’s optics have a great deal of CA (chromatic aberration for you non astronomers out there) which makes imaging tricky. We’re experimenting with notch filters to cut out all the colors but green.

The only Tinsley I knew of up there was the 30″. I don’t know anything about the 8″ Tinsley, though, Nicole. What’s its f ratio? Maybe Dr. Majewski can use the Tinsley’s optics (if the Cooke doesn’t work out) for the tidal tales work he has in mind… He needs something optically fast, IIRC…
Rich

You may be an astronomer but you are not naturally nocturnal. Moonbows-moondogs are not that uncommon but incredibly cool. As others have mentioned There can be double and triple moonbows and they fill up the sky. They are an emotional wondrous night time show.

Winter is coming and colorado/boulder is a great place to see them. Stay up on those cold long nights winter when the moon is full and you may see one or more. They are incredible things.

I’n not diurnal so I’ve never seen one around the sun much less a double or triple.